The race ended just as it started: in a whirlwind of emotions. It was a bittersweet ending to an incredible season of my life. And as one season came to a close, a new beautiful season has begun. I’m back home now in Nicaragua with my amazing family and my heart is so full it just may burst!
It’s a beautiful thing to end a journey in the very place that it began. For over a year I’ve been thinking of these very moments. I’ve thought about the joy of being back, back with my family holding ,sweet little babies, teaching Sunday school, pressing play on the life I felt I had put on pause for 3 years.
These are the moments I have prayed for. These are the scenes I’ve played over and over again in my head. This is the hope I held on to to get me through all the Job like moments of these past 3 years. These past 9 months in particular I have asked the Father to grow my heart to love His children better. And He has, but in a way I never expected.
I live in a blue house, a few blocks down the street from a beautiful old church here in Granada. Every evening when the harsh sun has been covered by a blanket of stars, my neighbors pull out their chairs and sit on their porches and talk and eat and laugh for hours. Across the street from me lives an elderly couple that I adore. I often go over and sit with them as they talk to me about life and they lecture me about why it’s so important that I hurry up and get married, all while shoving rice and beans down my throat because “I’m a Nica and it’s good for me”. I’m not really sure how our relationship of me coming over every night even started, but it did and our evening reunions have become some of my favorite times.
Down the street a little farther lives a group of guys. There’s about 15 of them and they love soccer, girls, pot, and drinking. They’re my best friends. A few years ago they use to annoy me a lot. They made it miserable to walk down the street because my sister and I were always being harassed. One day I had enough and I turned around and firmly told them that I am not an animal and I will not be talked to as such. They raised their eyebrows and sat silently as we continued our walk back to the house, and I thought ” oh my gosh, what did I just do? I’m a 5’2 shrimpy white girl and I just scolded a group of men who could stab me.. Keep walking.”
But that moment sparked a curiosity about me, and that spark turned into a beautiful friendship that we have maintained for quite some time now. And this group of men that use to strike fear, have become my protectors and my dearest friends.
Why am I telling you all of this?
My prayer for my time back home, was for God to grow my heart for his children. You see, loving the babies is easy for me. I can sit for hours with their pee on my shirt, playing the same games, wiping boogers, kissing booboos, picking out lice, because I love them, and loving them comes naturally to me. Want to know what doesn’t come naturally to me? Loving adults.
I have noticed that in so many of the missions teams as well that come to visit. It is so easy to do kids programs and VBS’s. The kids are so easy to love and they so easily love us. But the adults…that is another story. Most people don’t want to work with dirty, scary, obnoxious adults.
Adults don’t obey. Adults often don’t take me seriously. Adults are set in their ways. Adults have always seemed like something I should leave to someone else. I often forget that being a child of God does not have a cut off age. He has asked me to love his children, and I have asked to love them better, so he has given me the friendship of 15 grown men.
People look at me weird. The old women on our street love to talk. And from an outsiders perspective I can see how it looks. I am one small, white, 21 year old girl, spending my days with a bunch of guys the world deems as thugs. I have spent countless hours watching their soccer games, and walking to the lake and sitting outside on their porches. I have played nurse to their sicknesses and wounds. I have shoved sandwiches and coffee down their throats to sober them up and thrown bottles of liquor down drains. I’ve played ping pong and gone to the circus and laughed hard. I’ve seen them at their absolute best and I’ve seen them at their worst.
And on my best of days I feel slightly less than inadequate for the task The Lord has set before me, but that’s only because I am. I alone do not have the capacity to love them the way they need to be loved. And no amount of sandwiches or bandages that I give them is going to get them into heaven.
In Hosea 11:4 it says ” I led them with chords of human kindness,with ties of love.”
These past 2 weeks, that has been my strategy; to lead them with love and kindness. To drown out the harsh words the world throws at them with words of encouragement and love. To not call them by the names the world calls them: “huele”, “bagó”,” loco”, but instead remind them of the names our father calls them by : son, beloved, worthy.
This week I had the pleasure and honor of praying with them and my dad as they accepted Christ. I celebrated each sober day with them. I listened to them speak of their desires for a fresh start. And as I sit on their porch, eating plantains, listening to them chat about soccer for the 18,383 time today, I thank God that he gave me exactly what I asked for, even if it wasn’t at all what I expected.
